


you can hold on or let go

by nymphae



Series: the hundred [6]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Alternate Universe - His Dark Materials, F/M, so s2 spoilers i guess, this is...sort of canon?, this was weird
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-17
Updated: 2015-02-17
Packaged: 2018-03-13 10:36:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3378380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nymphae/pseuds/nymphae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The worst thing about having a corporeal soul is you can’t ignore it when it nags you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you can hold on or let go

**Author's Note:**

> Fair warning: this is a mess. It's way past midnight and I have class in five hours but...you win some, you lose some. I haven't actually read His Dark Materials, but I've read some great fics and that was enough to spark something. (I plan to read it eventually because it seems really cool.) Short cap: daemons are a person's literal embodiment of their soul, usually in the form of animals. You can read a little more on them [here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A6mon_%28His_Dark_Materials%29).
> 
> Some of the show's dialogue is off. I also may have smushed some original book stuff in here. I'm so sorry.
> 
> Read [hai_mae](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2908673)'s take on Bellamy/Clarke + daemons, since it inspired and is better than this one anyway.

When Bellamy was born, his mother was already alone.

She never says this, but he knows. Their quarters have never been bigger than they are now, and the two of them can barely fit as it is. He can sense, even as a child, the way other people on the Ark steer clear of her. When he gets older he’ll understand that it’s because of jealousy and some bullshit about morals. Most people aren’t able to have children even when they’re married and approved. No one ever tells him, but he knows his mother was never either of those things. After all, her daemon named Bellamy’s all on his own.

Abraham is a beetle that shimmers emerald and azure on her shoulders, in the dark curtain of her hair. He flickers in and out of Bellamy’s childhood memories, a blur of color.

“You were both wrinkly when you were born,” he tells them once. “Like raisins.”

Bellamy is maybe five. He has no idea what a raisin is. The only fruit they have on the Ark is expensive or inked into old children’s books.

“Julia was a mouse,” Aurora notes. Right now Julia is a puppy gnawing on Bellamy’s fingers. He loves her.

“Julia,” Bellamy says, and she looks up at him, little eyes gleaming. He is remembering the books that the woman at the school center gave him. “Like Julius.”

“Yes,” Abraham says. He is sitting by Aurora’s hand, gleaming. There is something heavy in his voice. “Like Julius.”

Aurora has begun to look more and more tired. She sleeps so deeply sometimes that Bellamy has to pinch her to wake her up. She places Abraham into her hair before she leaves their quarters.

“We love you, Bellamy,” Abraham used to murmur in that baritone of his, when Bellamy was just on the verge of sleep, tucked tight into his bed. Bellamy would never know why it was Abraham that said it and not Aurora.

When his sister is born, Julia is a squirrel sniffing around the baby’s head. She catches the new daemon in her little hand, just a fluttering moth. Bellamy waits, holding his breath. Daemons have always named daemons. _Daemons are the only ones with the knowledge to name souls,_ one of his books reads.

“Caesarion,” Julia says.

“Little Caesar,” Bellamy says immediately. He is mildly surprised. Julia reads his books over his shoulder sometimes, but hardly seems interested when he chatters about old Rome, old gods, old men.

“That,” Abraham’s voice says, “is a very heavy name for a tiny thing like him.” He doesn’t seem to like Octavia or her daemon. It’s hard for a beetle to show emotion, but Bellamy can tell somehow. He is hiding in Aurora’s hair, won’t even crawl out to look at the baby.

Julia releases the daemon, and it glimmers into a new shape, the tiniest of frogs. “Caesarion,” she says again. She seems so certain that Bellamy doesn’t question her. Aurora stares at them for the longest time, but she doesn’t say anything either.

 

Octavia can’t say _Caesarion_ for a long time. Bellamy sits with her for long stretches of time repeating it over and over again. She knows it’s her daemon’s name—she understands, but she fumbles over the syllables. She calls him Cess. Cess likes to be little creatures with wings, everything from gnats to butterflies. That worries Bellamy, because daemons like that can die so easily.

Even when he’s not fussing around Octavia, Julia does. When O sleeps, Cess tucked into her arms in the form of a cat or some other furry creature, Julia walks slow circles around them. She is almost always guarding the hatch when the guards come, curled up in apparent laxness on the blankets they put there, but she is always alert. Bellamy isn’t sure what she would do if they found it, but she’s a part of him, so he has an idea.

The older he gets, the harder it is. O gets bigger and bigger, the hatch gets smaller and smaller. Julia doesn’t settle like the other kids’ daemons do. “Nothing feels right,” she tells Bellamy, because she feels the uncertainty in him.

“It’s okay,” he says. He holds out his hands and she shifts into a pine marten that fits into the crook of his arm.

Bellamy is little when he realizes he doesn’t trust his mother, but he’s seventeen when he starts looking at her as something more malevolent. She’s always been shifty-eyed, but she’s more so now that Bellamy is paying attention. She has more secrets than he thought. She knows exactly when Octavia needs to disappear, knows exactly when to keep silent. Bellamy quips at her once—when he’s older he’ll grudgingly appreciate what she does to keep Octavia safe, but for now he remembers the terrifying words she had spoken once, after he’d pried her hands off of O’s neck years ago. _We were just playing a game._

Aurora’s eyes flash. She says, “Mind your tone, Bellamy Blake.” From her chair Octavia flinches, her grip clenching tight around the rat in her hands. Cess squeaks.

When Bellamy stares Aurora down, Abe makes an irritated, chitter-like noise. “Your mother is trying to protect you,” he snaps. He so rarely speaks now, except to say what Aurora cannot.

Bellamy starts to say something again, but Julia’s little claws—she’s a lizard now—dig into his shoulder, so he stays quiet. It’s not often that your own soul hushes you. When he sits she climbs off him so she can look at him warningly. She changes shape all the time, but her eyes are always the same.

 

Julia settles when Octavia gets discovered and his mother gets floated.

She’s a hissing, spitting cat when they tear Octavia away from him, scratching at the guards until she and Bellamy get kicked away. She’s a weasel when Aurora gets blown from the airlock, when Abe dissipates into Dust. It’s not until they go back to the quarters, when Bellamy sits down on the metal floor and realizes he’s all alone, that Julia’s stopped changing.

“This is it?” he asks her, and it’s amazing that he can even speak without sobbing, that he’s still alive at all. He’s twenty-two. He used to wish—wish _hard_ —that Julia would just settle already, so that he wouldn’t get all the stares when he went to work. Now, seeing her stationary, solid, he’s just scared.

She’s small, but her shape is definite. She’s trim and gray like steel, and her eyes seem darker than ever. She says, “This is it.” She comes over and pushes her wet nose against his neck, and he wraps a limp arm around her. A part of him wishes she were something more comforting than a wolf.

 

Julia is silent when Bellamy agrees to become a killer.

She’s been silent for a long time—not because she’s upset with him, but because they really don’t have anything to talk about anymore. His mother is dead. His sister is out of his reach. He’s cleaning up trash. She makes it a point to let him know she’s still here. She sleeps curled up beside him, noses his hand, rests her head on his knee. She follows him like a shadow.

She glares at Shumway like she wants to eat him, along with the shrewd-eyed bat that perches on his shoulder. But she says nothing as Bellamy accepts the gun, nothing as they walk away.

“Are you going tell me this is a bad idea?” he says.

Her silence persists. She usually holds her head high in a regal sort of gesture. Now she looks tired, her tail dragging as she lopes along beside him. People give them a wide berth in the halls. There are plenty of dog daemons wandering around the Ark, from greyhounds to beagles. Almost every guard has one. They’re supposed to be personifications of loyalty and strength, as well as obedience. (Obedience is the most important quality for a guard to have.) Wolves are not regarded in the same way; they’re rare, usually too big to settle on the Ark. They’re wild and feral. Some books say they’re the common daemons of leaders, people with a knack for politics and power. Bellamy thinks that’s bull.

The point is people don’t trust wolf daemons, and Julia is looked at like she has the plague, like she’s just another clump of mud tainting Bellamy’s name.

“You’ll still love me, won’t you?” he murmurs to her, in a rare moment of vulnerability.

She fixes him with her heavy stare. “Daemons are their humans,” she says. It’s a quote from one of Bellamy’s books, and he understands her meaning. She will only love him as long as he loves himself. He feels slightly sick, because he’s never loved himself.

He feels the gun weighing down his clothes, his heart. He’s thinking, _what kind of person will I be if I do this? What kind of person will I be if I don’t?_

“It’s for Octavia,” Julia says at last, and that’s enough to cement his resolve.

 

Everything is different on the ground.

Cess settles the moment Octavia steps foot on earth, shimmers into a kestrel with a broad wingspan and never changes again. He watches Octavia laugh, watches Cess fly and dive in circles around her, and remembers times when he wished he could keep her small forever. It feels like he’s done something good for once in his life.

Here, he has authority. Power, even, though he’s never actually wanted it. People hear his words and see his daemon, and they listen. Julia thrives on earth, where she has more space than she ever dreamed of having her whole life. She seems bigger, brighter, better. She makes him look more formidable than he is.

She isn’t able to leave his side anyway, not more than a few yards, but she seems to stick closer to him now that they’re on earth. She doesn’t try to make friends with the other daemons, who spend dinners rolling around together—a mass of badgers and squirrels and raccoons. Bellamy wonders if it’s because of him.

He has never met Clarke Griffin before, but he’s heard of her. He remembers being grateful when her father died and she went to prison, because at least for a minute no one talked about the cursed Blakes. For a minute, he was able to feel less visible, even if he was still alone and alienated. He almost thanks her in an argument, but that would be too far, somehow. He’s got some boundaries left.

Other than her family tragedy, he knows nothing about her. It enables him to hate her.

There’s something infuriating about the righteousness in her words, her persistent morality. She can’t see anything as it really is. Every time she butts heads with him her daemon, Felix, looks at him imperiously, judging him plainly. He’s a sleek little ocelot that silently follows her every footstep, slinks around her in circles and twines around her legs. He isn’t afraid to interject in Clarke’s arguments with Bellamy, even rolls his eyes occasionally.

“ _Some_ humans should be kept on a leash,” he gripes once.

Julia doesn’t often speak to others, daemon or human, but she bares her long teeth and snarls back, “Speak for yourself.”

Bellamy almost lets Clarke die, once. She falls through a hole in the ground and for a fraction of a second he thinks about letting go of her, about letting that smug-faced Felix turn to Dust. He’s already a murderer, what would be the difference? But he hauls her back up.

“You did the right thing,” Julia tells him later.

He bristles, because the words _the right thing_ were made for Clarke Griffin’s mouth. “You wanted to bite the head off her hellcat last week,” he reminds Julia sharply.

“Yeah,” she agrees. She pads along beside him, easily keeping his pace, and waits until no one else can hear before adding, “But it would’ve been such a waste.”

He stares at her. Never in their twenty-three years had Julia ever shown anything like affection for another daemon except for Cess, and even that’s the snippy, grudging kind that belongs to older siblings. But he lets it drop. They keep walking.

 

Dax tries to kill him and he kills Dax instead. He shoves a bullet into his neck. A _bullet_. His ermine daemon explodes into Dust. How does that make sense? He’ll play it back over and over later, wonder how it was possible to kill someone with a bullet and not a gun. How he could have the strength and the will to just…

Clarke is there when it happens, panting and bleeding. She tries to save him. He doesn’t know what she saw, if she hallucinated at all, but she keeps it to shivers while he has a goddamn breakdown. She tells him he’s not a monster and even Felix nods an assent.

“I need you,” she insists, her hair golden even in the dark.

“We need you,” Felix agrees. He’s burrowed into her coat so only his luminous eyes are visible. He looks weak. He stretches out a paw to touch Julia where she lies in Bellamy’s lap, and she lets him.

Julia sleeps curled up with him in his cot that night. Feeling the ache in him, she whines. That about sums up the guilt and the pain.

 

Grounder daemons are formidable and terrifying—far bigger than any of theirs. He guesses it’s about the sheer amount of space they have; the sky people were crammed into tiny quarters for almost a century. Everything is smaller in orbit. Sky daemons are creatures like squirrels and cats and lizards. Grounder daemons are bears and bobcats and impalas with horns like knives.

He’s half-sure he’s going to die in this war. He doesn’t know when that happens—somewhere between listening to Jasper suffer and watching the stare-off between the grounder warrior and Clarke. He’s sort of okay with it, really, as long as it’s him and nobody else, nobody important. Raven almost kills herself and her little fox trying to protect everyone. Bellamy is furious because that’s his job.

Lincoln’s daemon Nadia is a diamondback snake that stays curled up around his throat or his thick arms. (Bellamy gets over how she and Cess are too friendly, how Lincoln follows Octavia’s every move and how Octavia _smiles_ at him. Anything that makes his sister smile is a good thing.) Anya’s daemon Dimka is a hyena that never relaxes, never even shuts its eyes. They both say the same thing. _Sky people coddle their daemons. Grounders teach theirs to fight._

Julia is a wolf with razor-sharp teeth and thick skin, but she doesn’t want to fight any more than Bellamy does. They don’t talk about it.

Anya and Clarke disappear into thin air. It’s the third most terrible thing to happen to Bellamy, but he keeps it together where others can see him. He keeps it together when the _adults_ come down in a ball of fire and try to reinstall the order that killed half the hundred’s families. (They look at Bellamy like he’s untrustworthy, a killer with a black heart and a wolf daemon. It looks like, for a terrifying moment, that they’re right.) He keeps it together while Finn falls apart and slaughters eighteen people.

She returns beaten and bloodied but alive, and when she hugs him it’s almost like a punch. It knocks the wind out of him for a second, but he hugs back, breathes in the scent of her under the grime and mud. Above their heads Cess flutters and lets out a squawk that sounds a lot like a laugh.

Octavia says wryly, “There’s something I thought I’d never see.”

Felix pushes his forehead against Julia’s and _wow_ that feels weird. But good. That word lingers. _Good._

And then Finn dies. He thinks it that way. _Finn dies_ instead of _Clarke killed Finn_. Raven screams, one long wail, and he holds her while Rex crumples into a tiny heap on the ground. In the end he has to carry Raven away; Julia picks up her daemon between her jaws and follows suit.

It eats at Clarke, that much is obvious. She avoids light. Her hands tremble. The pride in her shoulders and her spine have vanished. Raven hates her baldly. _I would’ve done it, too_. He thinks it at both of them, but doesn’t say it. Julia is keeping an eye on Rex, but she doesn’t say it either.

Bellamy doesn’t trust Lexa or her wasp daemon. There’s something about it—she calls him Luka—clinging to her armor and her hair that reminds him of his mother. There’s something in her pale eyes, too, that seems off to him. But Clarke and Felix trust her, so Bellamy and Julia follow.

 

They consider his plan for about four seconds before Felix, perched on Clarke’s back, says, “No.”

“No?” he repeats.

“No,” Clarke agrees. “It’s too dangerous.”

From the ground Julia scoffs. Bellamy knows what she’s thinking. Danger they’ve encountered before. “Since I don’t take orders from you,” Bellamy says, “I’m going to need a better reason.”

Her mouth works (he’s been watching her mouth a lot). She says, “I can’t lose you, too, okay?” Felix punctuates the statement with his heavy little stare, and Bellamy is forced to look away for fear that he’ll lose control.

But something changes. Something Bellamy can’t understand. Clarke appears by the fire rigid from her eyes to her muscles. She says, face half-shadowed, “It’s worth the risk.” He inhales sharply, and Julia presses into his legs. For comfort or reassurance, he doesn’t know. He takes the paper from Clarke's hands

 

“You love her,” Julia whispers.

He is studying the map in his hands by firelight, numbing himself. He is a soldier and a leader where he thought he’d never be. The less emotion, the better. He ignores her.

She gets up and lopes over, lifts a paw to push down the paper. The worst thing about having a corporeal soul is you can’t ignore it when it nags you. “You love her,” she says again. “Or you wouldn’t be doing this.”

The second worst thing about having a corporeal soul is you can’t lie to it. “There’s nothing we can do,” he says shortly.

Julia looks at him with those dark, dark eyes. “My poor soldier boy,” she murmurs. “You really believe that.” But when his mouth tightens she releases the map and curls up at his feet, knowing they’re going to fight a war on another front in the morning.

 

They take her away from him, and it _hurts_.

This shoots automatically to the top of the list, the number one most terrible thing to happen to him. It hurts like nothing has ever hurt before, so much that he realizes, in a haze of agony, that he wants to die. Death would be better than this—anything would be better than this.

He curls up into a ball in his cage and waits to die. Prays to die. He barely registers it when the grounder girl in the cage next to him spits on him, barely registers that she seems to be okay even though she’s daemon-less, too. They take him out of the cage, poke him and prod him, take his blood, and stuff him back in. He doesn’t die. The pain lessens.

 _Julia,_ he thinks desperately. _Julia, I love you._ He has no idea if she can hear.

A timid girl with dark hair wakes him up what feels like centuries later. He’s upside down and torn-up, or it feels like it. She’s Maya, and she’s got a soft voice and soft hands and she fights to protect him even though she’s never met him.

“My daemon,” he rasps. He’s just killed a man and the guilt is lost amongst the pain pulsing in him, like someone’s pulled his heart from his chest. “Where is she?”

He stumbles after Maya half-naked until he feels it, the pull of _Julia Julia Julia_. He scrapes his knees in his hurry to touch her, nearly sobs with the relief. She’s weak, like him, but unharmed.

“I’m sorry,” Maya breathes. She’s got fretful hands and a daemon in the shape of a mouse peeking out of the pocket on her dress. “You can’t—she can’t go with you. She’s too big, they’ll—”

“Notice,” Bellamy says. “Yeah.” The thing is, he’s pretty sure the thing between them is different—stretched, somehow. The pain is gone. He thinks he can walk away from her, if he wants to. He doesn’t want to.

“It’s okay,” Julia tells him. She pushes her nose through the bars, licks his chin. “Go.”

“I love you,” he says, without hesitation. He hasn’t said it before. “I’ll come back for you.”

“I love you,” she says.

He puts on the dead man’s clothes and promises the same thing to the grounder girl who saved his life. Leaving Julia behind hurts again, but in a different way.

 

It works out.

It takes too long, and too many people die, but it works out. Bellamy manages to turn off the acid fog without dying. Clarke and Raven lie to him, but he forgives them. With Echo and Maya he wakes up every sleeping grounder and slumbering daemon, and it’s too easy after that.

He starts the trek home war-weary and heavy and _different_. There is still so much ahead—peace to be wrought and haggled over, graves to be dug, wounds to heal—but he’s tired. He collapses and they have to carry him the rest of the way. He isn’t conscious at the time but they tell him, later, that Julia disappears for hours. They can spend longer distances apart now, but that’s the only time they do. She is there when he wakes in the med bay and she doesn’t leave again.

Octavia, sadly, isn’t his most frequent visitor. She’s got her own thing going on now. She’s somebody’s apprentice, on her way to being a grounder warrior in her own right, but she loves him too much to think of leaving him behind. He’s selfishly pleased about that. She kisses him on the forehead now, when she arrives and when she leaves. Like _she’s_ the older one. He’s not complaining.

Raven sweeps in on her crutches from time to time to show him what she’s tinkering with. She’s the only person who’s genuinely smiling. Rex gets into it with Julia playfully, and they nip and grumble at each other like siblings. Bellamy remembers that when he and Raven hooked up a million years ago Rex plainly disapproved, giving him glowering stares and baring sharp little teeth. Now he makes jokes about how horrible Bellamy looks, and both Julia and Raven laugh.

Echo comes to sit with him, too, talks to him about her clan and everything that’s going on outside. Her daemon is a lizard with a flickering tongue and spikes covering its body. Echo is pretty and fierce; she saved his life in the mountain and kissed him once, seems to want to do it again. There could be something, he supposes. But Saul tries to climb onto Julia and his daemon flicks hers away like it's nothing more than a gnat, so maybe not.

Clarke doesn’t visit him. He knows she’s there—he can hear her voice, see Felix’s shadow in the doorway—but she doesn’t come in. It’s her mother who treats him, the woman with a stern mouth and hard eyes that freakishly match her daemon’s. Rowan is a paternalistic owl that sees through Bellamy completely.

“You’re very brave,” Abby Griffin says, however grudgingly. “To go alone like that.” She is marking things off on a chart. She’s already injected him with something twice. But maybe that was yesterday. Time is blurring for him right now.

He just grunts in reply. She’s fishing for something, he can see it in her shrewd eyes, but neither she nor her daemon press.

 

He wakes up again when Julia snarls. He’s thinking, for some wild reason, that he’s still in the mountain, almost vaults to his feet and runs.

Then he sees the little ocelot at the foot of his bed, tail low and listless. The girl follows, arms limp at her side. She comes closer and Julia grumbles.

“Jules,” Bellamy says. He reaches out to touch her soft head and she shrinks back into his touch, muscles rigid. She’s angry at Clarke—blaming her. She’s the only part of him that does.

“I’m glad you’re not dead,” Clarke says, eyes downcast. She looks ghostly pale under her tan, her hair greasy and flaked with dirt and dried blood.

“Me too,” Bellamy replies. He pushes himself to a sitting position. He’d been shot a few times, and his healing wounds grumble at the movement. Julia hops up onto the bed territorially, shoves herself into an impossibly small ball between his hip and the bedframe.

“I killed people,” Clarke states bluntly. “I knew the missile was coming and I chose to let everyone in Ton DC die so you would live.”

He doesn’t know why she’s telling him this but his brain reels. _Octavia was there_ , he thinks. _Octavia could have died_. Julia growls, but Clarke doesn’t move back. She doesn’t offer excuses or explanations. She just sits on the edge of the bed and stares, waiting for his response.

“I don’t know that I would’ve done differently,” he says carefully. “I killed people in the mountain. I killed someone’s dad.” The name _Lovejoy_ will haunt him until the end of his days.

Something in Clarke’s face has cracked. The minute differences in her expression—the dent between her brows, the widening of her eyes, the slight part of her mouth—make her look younger and more vulnerable. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I sent you to die so I could prove something to myself. So I could—” She stops. “I’m sorry,” she repeats.

“Things are changing,” he tells her. It’s his way of forgiving her without saying the words. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

She stares at him. Whether she’s trying to say something else or waiting for him to do the same, he can’t tell. “Okay,” she says. She squeezes his hand, and then she leaves. Felix trails behind her, looks back at them once before he melts away into the sunlight to follow her.

“I want to bite her,” Julia says, but it sounds less acidic than before. (She’s been trash-talking Clarke for a while.)

Bellamy wants something else entirely.

 

He’s cleared to be walking around, but not on his own. Somebody—Maya, Raven, Echo, Miller—is supposed to be keeping an eye on him at all times, just in case he has trouble breathing again or he wears himself out. He has never been babysat in his entire life and is wholly uncomfortable with it. It took a whole lot of effort to ditch Murphy (who is, strangely, a very good babysitter under these circumstances) and duck into Clarke’s tent. She’s not here. It’s covered in maps and notes and her clothes and it smells like her, which does something pleasant to his chest.

“It reeks,” Julia complains. Not to his soul, obviously.

He waits. He walks a slow circle around the room to peer at her neat handwriting, her lists of schedules and names. Grounders have paired with sky people to do most of the work from camp to camp; it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between them now that they’ve linked like this, shared marrow and blood and death. There’s a page covered in drawings sticking out from her makeshift desk. It’s mostly nature, some studies of Felix’s eyes and muzzle and long sloping body, but there’s one of him, too. A small sketch of his profile, complete with freckles. That makes him feel oddly warm.

He sits on her bed to wait some more. He blames his physical weakness and Julia when he dozes off.

“What are you doing in here?”

He jolts awake, too fast. At his feet Julia’s head snaps up. Clarke is occupying the doorway, frowning in concern, with Felix in her arms.

“I just—” Bellamy starts, and stops. “I wanted to see you.”

Something unreadable flickers across her face. She was hard to read before, but now she’s impossible. She lets Felix jump to the ground. “Okay,” she says easily. “Is something wrong?”

“I love you,” Bellamy blurts. Clarke blinks. Both daemons whip their heads around to stare at him. No turning back now. “I love you, and I would do it all again if you asked.” He adds, pathetically, “I think I would do anything if you asked.”

Silence rolls. Both girl and daemon stare. He wonders if now would be a good time to fake a heart attack.

“Oh,” Clarke says in a tiny voice.

“But we don’t _want_ to.” It’s the first time Julia has spoken in days. She is staring down Clarke like she’s prey, but Bellamy knows she’s afraid, too. “If there’s nothing here…” She huffs through her nose. “ _I_ don’t want to die for you, Clarke Griffin. Not if we’re nothing to you.”

Clarke stares, first at Julia, then at Bellamy. “I don’t want you to do anything for me.,” she says, and swallows. “You’re…not nothing to me.”

From her feet Felix says, very quietly, “Clarke loves you, too.”

Bellamy looks at her and he sees it in her face, in her glassy eyes, in her watery smile. And then she’s striding over, grabbing his face, kissing him hard and fast like he once dreamed she would. He doesn’t even care that they’re essentially being watched and that he must smell and that they’ve both got blood on their hands. The only reason he breaks away is to inhale sharply, touch his tender ribs.

“Sorry,” she murmurs. Her smile is brighter now. One of her hands slides from his shoulder to his heart, which beats out a stuttering meter that he’s really glad she can’t hear.

“It’s okay,” he breathes, halfway to dizziness.

She frowns, a beautiful sight, and touches his cheek, his neck. “You should rest,” she says. “Lexa’s waiting for me.” She pushes until he lies flat. “But you can sleep here, if you want.”

He doesn’t resist her. He can’t. “People will talk,” he says, half-joking.

She kisses him again, a precious press of her mouth, and then smiles. “Let them talk,” she says. “See if I care.” As she leaves Felix goes to follow. In a shocking gesture, Julia licks him, from chin to ear. He blinks at her until he grins as much as an ocelot can, and scampers after Clarke.

“You just licked another daemon,” Bellamy tells her. “One that you don’t even like.”

“Daemons are their humans,” she replies, which could mean either _You also licked a daemon_ or _I love Felix._ His thoughts are sluggish. Ditching Murphy is more draining than one might think.

Julia climbs up onto Clarke’s bed after a moment, stepping unceremoniously on Bellamy’s stomach so he huffs and squirming down into the crook of his arm so she can put her head on his shoulder. “Hopeless,” she mutters to him.

He curls his arm around her, thinks about the lone wolf jokes people used to make about them, and laughs. “Yeah,” he agrees. “Hopeless.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is like...the most canon thing I've ever written. It's also probably the shortest. Eh. I hope you liked it anyway. More to this series soon.
> 
> Human/Daemon (name):  
> Bellamy/gray wolf (Julia)  
> Clarke/ocelot (Felix)  
> Octavia/kestrel (Caesarion)  
> Raven/red fox (Rex)  
> Lincoln/rattlesnake (Nadia)  
> Anya/hyena (Dimka)  
> Lexa/wasp (Luka)  
> Maya/house mouse  
> Abby/little owl (Rowan)  
> Echo/thorny devil (Saul)  
> Dax/ermine
> 
> Title's from [this](http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/variations-on-the-word-love/>this%20poem</a>%20by%20Margaret%20Atwood.) poem by Margaret Atwood.


End file.
